You haven’t taken a vacation in five years.
As a responsible person, you announce your vacation two months in advance. You ensured projects will run without you while you’re out for two days in Portland, Oregon. You’ll also be in a hotel downtown and your phone has reception. When you send your long email about your upcoming break, you also include links to documentation to read. You’ve also attached system architecture diagrams detailed to the function level.
Your manager says, “Can we reach you – just in case? You never know. You should also bring your laptop.”
Please don’t do this to your team.
Take vacation time as an opportunity for your team to operate without one engineer. Let your team value their contributions in their absence. I know projects will slow down and bugs can’t get fixed. Don’t bother someone on their vacation if you can help it.
One of my friends who is an engineering manager went on vacation. An issue came up where he could’ve fixed it “within a heartbeat,” so he says. What I thought was amazing was his org did not page him while he was out for three days.
They went into panic mode. The other engineering managers banded together and pulled his entire team to examine the issue. They were able to figure everything out. The effort wasn’t efficient for the company but my friend got to have his vacation of 3 days.
When he returned, he was asked kindly to disperse his knowledge more. Far too much knowledge concentrated on one person for a critical project.
Your job is to locate single points of failure. Create contingency plans when someone goes on vacation. Treat this as a learning opportunity for a junior engineer to step up and cover.
For the engineer on vacation, let them be in peace.
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